Monday, August 24, 2009

Annoying Things my Copy editors do-

-Write paragraphs on corrections twice as large as the paragraph that I wrote.
-Use poor sentence structure to criticize my sentence structure- "Your use of the same word for two sentence in a row is unnecessary right, that's a bit redundant, correct?"
-Give me perfectly contradictory advice. I had two Copy Editors do that today. I swear it looks like they planned it out. One wrote "You don't need two steps for this, just write "Download and Install." So, I thought, "Oh OK" and I wrote "Download and Install" on my next assignment. The next copy editor writes a huge "HOW?" next to that step. So I growl and write it out in multiple steps again.

Repeat until sufficiently angry. It's too bad I don't work with them in person. I could have them duel it out to the death to decide who's right. That would be awesome.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

I feel the urge to make fun of personal ads on the internet. You know, the profiles that are all exactly the same. So i decided to write one of my own, by taking one I happened to see online, and writing it's exact opposite. This would be this person in bizarro world.

So, for your viewing pleasure-

The anti profile:


Name: Not Susan
Self Summary: I'm pretty co-dependent and do a lot of things not on my own, but instead with my co-dependent friends in tow. I love not traveling, not doing yoda and not "hanging out". I never hang with my friends in "casual settings". I hate going to the theatre. I would hate nothing more than to bake/cook more.

I am cruel, never sarcastic, and I am very protective of my "beating up my friends" time.

***
Books/music/etc.

I never read books and I hate reading. There's now way i would be caught dead watching insipid reality shows or TV programs about "teenagers" who are in their late thirties.
***

A typical Friday Night:

I have a typical friday night. Not like everyone else in God's green earth who answers this question with "I don't have one of those, tee hee, i can stay in or go out with ease!" My typical friday night does not include "taking it easy", "maybe seeing a movie" or "Just hanging out." My typical friday night involves shunning my friends, burning down movie theatres and taking everything HARD.

***
You should message me if:

You are an unforgivably cruel, freakishly abnormal girl looking for the same, or if you think we could have some horrible, soul-crushing conversations.

***
Fin
***
Eh, not my best, but some of it did amuse me. Maybe I'll get a better idea later and I can rework it.

Thursday, July 02, 2009

Sometimes i want to just wildly lie to people in "How To" articles. It's a tragedy that i don't. I miss out on comic gold like answering articles like "How Do I Find Spyware on my computer" with like "Hire a detective".

And answering stupid ones that like "How to recover file software" With like "I don't know how do you recover clothing pants?"

Friday, June 26, 2009

I hate it when copy editors send me notes like "Please edit for clarity and proofread". OK, so i missed something. But wait a minute-"please edit"? Isn't that YOUR job? What exactly do you do again? Man I wish I could just point at things and say "fix this". I should start a television repair company that just sends broken TVs back to their owners with sticky notes on them that say "This is broken, I suggest you fix it".

You out-lazied me. Well done sir.

Monday, April 20, 2009

Copyright law is the stupidest thing ever. You can't so much as post a picture of a chicken in an article you sell online without:

Asking the chicken's permission, asking the farmer who own's the chicken's permission, asking the owner of the windmill in the background's permission, asking the permission of the jet company that owns the jet that appears as a tiny speck in the background of the picture, etc., ad nauseum.

Maybe it's good I didn't become a lawyer after all. Although if there is a hell, there should be a separate lawyer hell, and copyright lawyers should be right at the bottom. There, they are made to take pictures of eachother to post in daily updated blogs, with proper permission obtained, of course.

The only real thing I can do with impunity is take pictures of myself. I should just take pictures of myself typing and be like "this is how you type up an essay!"

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Friday, March 06, 2009

Lately I'm getting some practice writing freelance articles. I just did one entitled "How to Remove Popup Blockers for Free".

I imagine obviously some people aren't as familiar with computers as me, and to them sch an article will be of great help. But to me that is like writing an article called "How to Urinate in a Toilet Without Peeing Yourself". It seems so obvious it's hard to believe that you will actually sit down, close your eyes to think about it for a minute and then write something like

Step 1: Go to bathroom
Step 2: Remove pants carefully
Step 3: Sit down on toilet, taking care not to fall in.

And I'm supposed to add in things too, such as links to other helpful websites, (which in this case would surely be a link to a Mental Ward), keywords ('moron' is the first one that comes to mind, perhaps that is unkind of me) and Tips and Warnings

Tips and Warnings? What the heck do i write for tips and warnings regarding something so basic?

"Warning: Failing to urinate can have serious medical side effects."
"Tips: It is ok to quit peeing in case of a Ninja attack, but you should resume once they have been repelled."

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Wednesday, February 11, 2009

One thing I do for a living while I'm not coming up with glorious one-liners for this blog, is edit student papers as a tutor. I work for a service, and not specific students as clients most of the time. This means that each student gets about 20 minutes. This is not a lot of time to read the essay, make suggestions, send it back to them, and talk about why their grammar makes me cry.

Ipso facto, students who tell me to "check everything" when I ask what they want me to look for in their essay that looks like a drunk hamster wrote it as a side effect from running across a keyboard, well- it is irritating.

Check everything? Really? Absolutely everything?

Careful now, wayward student. I'm planning on going to grad school for creative writing, you may not want to give me carte blanche to check everything I can think of.

It makes me want to check their paper from the perspective of a Japanese speaker, pointing out that the only words I recognized in their paper were "ninja" "samurai" and "no", this last being not used as a verb at all.

I would check for every single informal fallacy, and point out all of them in excruciating detail. I would point out to them that i checked their paper for heroic verse, and that the feet, meter, and rhyming scheme were all wrong, as well as a suspicious lack of an epic central hero, unless you count them on their daring adventures involving their class trip to a museum, which I don't. Unless they beheaded a tour guide, in which case, maybe.

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